Sophia in Ireland: Thirteen

It is dawn of the following morning. The companions have regathered as they promised on the Hill of Tara beside the Well from which they had made a hasty exit the night before. Last to arrive is the Narrator, who hurries towards them.

The Narrator speaks to them:

Thank you for coming back. I need to apologize, to explain…Last evening was the first time I ever left the Storyteller like that. The first time I ever left before she did. Before saying goodbye. But I was tired of her evasions, her way of playing with us. I thought I no longer cared anymore to know who she was… if you could know how I have yearned to ask her that question over the many months I have been visiting her in the Well, how I had counted on her finally revealing who she was with all of you there.

I slept badly. I felt the rough edges of a frayed illusion. I thought the Storyteller was merely a projection, conjured up out of my own need for a sacred feminine presence. I thought I had woven her to my own design, out of threads of words and images and old stories, out of poetry and the writings of the Mystics and the Feminist Theologians. I had invented something that neither mystic nor poet nor theologian could possibly recognize. I had done the very thing that all my life others have warned me not to do: I had let my imagination run away with me.

But I wakened in the deep heart of the night from a dream. No, it was more than dream. It was a memory, a clear recollection of a morning during the journey I made to Egypt in 2008 with a group led by Jean Houston.

In memory, I saw the tiny sanctuary sacred to the goddess Isis on the Island of Philae in the Nile River. Jean is reading something about Isis, a series of sacred names. The writing is from a first or second century Roman, not a Christian. It is the way the Sacred One identifies herself to the man named Lucius that makes the connection for me…

I, the natural mother of all life, the mistress of the elements, the first child of time, the supreme divinity…. I, whose single godhead is venerated all over the earth under manifold forms, varying rites, and changing names…. Her words reminded me of the way that the Hafiz poem began, the one the Storyteller recited… I am every particle of dust and wheat…I am singing from the mouth of animals and birds…

The goddess of many names says to Lucius: Behold, I am come to you in your calamity. I am come with solace and aid. Away then with tears. Cease to moan. Send sorrow packing. Soon through my providence shall the sun of your salvation rise. Hearken therefore with care unto what I bid. Eternal religion has dedicated to me the day which will be born from the womb of this present darkness.

In my half-dreaming or remembering, I heard one of the women in our group ask us to call out all the names by which we have known the Sacred Feminine. I remember hearing voice after voice calling out wonderful names. I listened as memory sharpened. Mystical Rose. Tower of Ivory. Gate of Heaven. Many of those names were familiar to me, titles I’d learned as a child, and they had then referred to Mary. I heard in memory my own voice call out: Star of the Sea. Then I heard Jean’s voice, strong, certain: Mary in all her forms.

Mary…Star of the Sea… Mystical Rose.

I was deeply asleep as the old litany danced through my memory.

Stretch your imagination way, way back to the dawn of humankind, to the time when God was imaged as woman, for woman was the one who bled without dying, who gave birth to new life. Long before I heard the Story of Etain, I was beginning to understand that the feminine aspect of the Holy had been buffeted by the winds of patriarchy, left abandoned to the mercies of the sea, only now and then finding a bower of rest in the wisdom of a Mac Og. I may even have begun to guess that the Holy feminine is now, in the fullness of time, coming to new birth through those who are willing to nurture her, to embody her. She is coming through our need for Her, our hunger for Her and for all that She represents.

Through millennia of buffeting, relentless harrying, the holy feminine presence was blown away by the winds of time, until, exhausted, she fell into a cup, was swallowed by the earth, buried in deep darkness where she has waited. Until the time is right. The day which will be born from the womb of this present darkness. This is her time.

I know nowthe one whom the Storyteller embodies, who she is.

But the knowing is not a resolution of mystery. For Mary herself is only another form, another name among so many. The Storyteller may call herself Brigid, the Celtic name for the Sacred Feminine. Brigid, both goddess and saint, was so strong in the hearts and minds of people at the time of the coming of Christianity, that she endured in the spiritual life of the people and the country. Brigid is today the acceptable face of the Feminine Divine in the Celtic Christian tradition, closely associated with Mary, the Mother of Jesus.

When I set out to return here to find you, I was smiling. My heart was flooded with gladness. Like Etain, I lifted my wings. I flew. I know now and can tell you the truth: Any name will do! We may choose to call this loving presence — which now, in the clear light of morning, I know to be more real than my own breath — we may choose to name her as we wish. She will not be bound by a name.

Everything I’ve told you is true. You may trust it. You may trust me. And above all, you may trust her. With your life. It is our desires that will draw her to us.

We need not return to the Well. She will be where we are.

Note: This concludes the tale of “The Wooing of Etain”. The story itself is translated from ancient Irish manuscripts by Ann Moray and is found in her collection, A Fair Stream of Silver (William Morrow and Company New York 1965). The narration that surrounds Etain’s tale is from a play written by Anne Kathleen McLaughlin : Silver Stream, Sacred Earth copyright 2017.